More changes at Nokia (News - Alert) today, and these are the ones many employees feared were coming.

The Finnish mobile phone company is apparently getting ready to hand about 3,500 employees pink slips, according to Business Insider, but the jobs being shed aren't necessarily coming out of Finland. Nokia will be closing one of its manufacturing plants located in Cluj in Western Romania, which will leave about 2,200 people minus jobs, and consolidating its Location and Commerce teams, which will account for the other 1,300.

These aren't the first uncomfortable changes at Nokia by a long shot, of course. In the last year or so, the company has acquired a new CEO in the form of former Microsoft (News - Alert) man Stephen Elop (who replaced long-time CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo), replaced several of its top layer executives, most recently with the appointment of new Chief Technology Officer Henry Tirri, announced a partnership with Microsoft in February 2011, meaning the company will be replacing its long-time mobile operating system Symbian with Windows Phone (News - Alert) 7, and lost about 11 percent of its stock price.

These new layoffs are part of a series: 4,000 employees were let go in the spring, 3,000 were transferred to Accenture (News - Alert). In total, this brings the number of job losses this year along to 10,500.

“We are seeing solid progress against our strategy, and with these planned changes we will emerge as a more dynamic, nimble and efficient challenger,” said CEO Elop in a statement. “We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our workforce and operations with our path forward.”

Nokia is seen to be floundering in the high growth smartphone arena largely because of an inability to innovate in the face of hot competitors such as Apple and its iPhone (News - Alert) and Google and its Android platform. The company's new Windows Phone-based handsets aren't expected to appear until the end of 2011.